The Media Independent Handover (MIH) technology is designed to implement seamless handover between different networks and improve the user experience. The MIH technology enables handover between different link-layer access technologies. A uniform interface is provided on the basis of different access technologies to obtain a trigger event and other information for implementing handover between different network access technologies.
For the purpose of updating the location of a multimode terminal applied in a heterogeneous network in the prior art, all interfaces of the multimode terminal based on different access technologies need to undergo the location update process. The location update in the prior art is to update the locations of other interfaces through the currently enabled interface of the multimode terminal. For example, a multimode terminal may update the location of the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) interface through a Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) interface. The location update process is as follows:
The multimode terminal encapsulates the WiMAX location update request into a WiFi location update request message. Through a Paging Agent (PA) of the WiFi network, the message is sent to a Paging Coordinator (PC) of the WiFi network. After receiving this message, the PC of the WiFi network forwards the WiMAX location update request in the message to the PC of the WiMAX network. The PC of the WiMAX network sends a WiMAX location update response message to the PC of the WiFi network. The PC of the WiFi network encapsulates the received WiMAX paging response message into a WiFi location update response message, and sends it to the multimode terminal through the PA of the WiFi network, and thus location update is implemented for the WiFi interface and the WiMAX interface.
It can be seen from the above description that, in the location update mode in the prior art, every interface of the multimode terminal needs to detect its own location information, and initiate location update periodically for every access technology, which leads to too frequent information interactions at the network side and increases the load of the system and the power consumption of the multimode terminal.